The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a lot about social isolation and what happens when people are quarantined for an extended period of time. From my own experience and talking with friends, it seems everyone is stressed out and overworked. I found some research on the effects of social isolation and stress. In “Making ‘Good’ Choices: Social Isolation in Mice exacerbates the Effects of Chronic Stress on Decision Making,” researchers Arish Rakshasa and Michelle Tong hypothesized that social isolation amplifies stress.
I found this experiment particularly interesting and thought-provoking. To summarize, the researchers split up the mice into two groups – one socially housed, one isolated. Then, both groups of mice were subjected to induced stress by undergoing a “seven-day period of repeated immobilization” (Rakshasa, 2020). The purpose of this is to induce stress equally both groups, and see which group is more affected. Stress was measured in two ways: an open field test and measurement of stress hormones. The open field test is a measure of “anxiety-like behavior that is sensitive to stress,” since mice will tend to stay closer to walls when stressed (Rakshasa, 2020).
They were able to conclude that the housing situation had a significant impact on the measured stress levels. Not surprisingly, the mice that were socially isolated were much more sensitive to the induced stress. This lines up with my experiences and conversations with people. I know some people more prone to stress or depressive behavior, and they seem to be the ones who struggled the most while quarantined. On the other hand, some people are actually making the best of it and liking the situation. They are able to work from home and pursue their hobbies or projects without social obligations or responsibilities. Based on people I talked to, the second group is mostly introverted people.
I found this study to be interesting, especially in the time of the pandemic. People are more socially isolated than normal, so it is interesting to see the effects of this isolation when combined with stress. If I were to design an experiment to do something similar with humans, I would first have all of my participants fill out a questionnaire or take a personality test. This would add another dimension of data to the final results because we would have another layer of data to incorporate. This would be much more complicated mathematically, but I would be curious to see how different personality types respond to being socially isolated.
Mudra Rakshasa, A., & Tong, M. T. (2020). Making “good” choices: Social isolation in mice exacerbates the effects of chronic stress on decision making. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 14, 10. http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00081